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Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

theouterhaven.net

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Re: Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

#21
post #15

This whole format is a dead end. Clubhouse user growth and engagement is stalled out (and likely in decline). Not that Facebook minds. The millions spent cloning Clubhouse are a rounding error on their financial statements.

Strong agree. I'm still a little bewildered about how Clubhouse got so much hype in the first place considering the actual product obviously sucks.

With that said, I think Clubhouse could be in a way better position if they'd used their head start to actually work on making the product not awful.

I have listened to 1-2 conversations where I've thought hey this has some value, but every time I open up and scroll through it it looks like early 2000's email spam except with emojis. Super low value topics like hustle harder or marketing nonsense.

With social apps the algorithm is everything. I mean just look at Tik Tok. I feel like Clubhouse could have tried harder to make a magical experience where you opened it up and an interesting conversation was tossed your way. Oh well.

Re: Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

#22
post #8

Is breathtaking the amount of effort Facebook has spent xeroxing other products. I’m still amused by how they had their own online game show because of the success of HQ Trivia.

Facebook... and Spotify, and Twitter. They've all got Clubhouse clones going now. Sometimes I find the state of 'innovation' in large tech companies a little depressing...

It's hard to grow as a social media startup now. If you're successful, Zuckerberg and the rest will spend tens of millions cloning you.

Only a select few reach escape velocity. Snapchat, TikTok.

How do you survive without being trampled by the giants?

Re: Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook... and Spotify, and Twitter. They've all got Clubhouse clones going now. Sometimes I find the state of 'innovation' in large tech companies a little depressing...

It's probably true that they cannot resist cloning existing feature that's already working. But to cheer you up, FB is putting lots of efforts (rumor goes 10000 folks) working on AR/VR. That's quite a lot innovation :)

And 200 are working on "how to show ads in 3d"

Re: Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

#25
As I have stated before [0], can anyone tell me how Clubhouse is somehow worth $4B? with around 2 million users? It appears that as soon as they have released the Android app in early May, almost all the competitors have caught up and already ate their breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The only ones active on there are the VCs themselves spamming the notifications. Now we have Facebook launching their own Clubhouse-like service, it looks like there is no way out for Clubhouse to compete against the clones is there?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883580

Re: Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

#26
post #15

This whole format is a dead end. Clubhouse user growth and engagement is stalled out (and likely in decline). Not that Facebook minds. The millions spent cloning Clubhouse are a rounding error on their financial statements.

Probably doesn't help that Clubhouse was iOS-only for a long time. People in the local dev community would now and then suggest a Clubhouse night, but we have to shot it down everytime as it would eliminate a sufficient portion of members. End up using Discord, but definitely would have jumped on the ship, had they not cashing in on exclusivity for so long.

Re: Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

#29
post #15

This whole format is a dead end. Clubhouse user growth and engagement is stalled out (and likely in decline). Not that Facebook minds. The millions spent cloning Clubhouse are a rounding error on their financial statements.

Clubhouse is still invite-only, so that’s an artificial cap on growth.

They still have the one-shot option of opening up to anyone and getting a huge bump of use and users, maybe right before another round or IPO.

Re: Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services

#30

Financially it makes sense for Facebook to keep cloning products because it pays for itself when it works out (Instagram Stories) and there are no regulations or other penalties for doing it.

More than that, knowing that Facebook is willing to throw tens of millions into cloning your product and pushing it to their 2 billion users makes it difficult to start a competing product. Even as a loss leader to kill competition, it's well worth it.
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